The world has until 2020 to reverse the trend of rising greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change, the world’s top climate scientists warned on Friday.
Achieving this would reduce the world’s annual gross domestic product by 3 per cent in 2030, the UN expert panel concluded. Emissions have been rising for the past 150 years.
Charles Kolstad, professor of environmental economics at the University of California and a lead author of the report, told the FT: “It is costly but affordable. You do not want to throw that kind of money away. But if you want to accomplish the goal, then the cost is acceptable.”
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to the required level can be achieved with today’s technologies but bringing them into widespread use is likely to require extensive changes in public policy, according to the report published in Bangkok, Thailand, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group convened by the UN.
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